Opinions - Topics from May, 2012

With smoked chicken, potato salad, green beans, and scrumptious desserts, Fourth District teachers and staff dined on picnic tablecloths accented with Gerber Daisies for Teacher Appreciation Week. Along with the delicious meal, the teachers and staff selected their daisies to take home and enjoy. Thank You Fourth District staff for all your hard work in educating our children.
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In April Governor Nathan Deal signed HB 397 into law. HB 397 is an overhaul of the state’s Open Meetings and Open Records Acts that won bipartisan support within the state legislature this year and is now in effect.
Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens, the Georgia Press Association, the Georgia First Amendment Foundation and other key media and government associations worked hand-in-hand to rewrite this important legislation. So why is this legislation important? It protects the public’s right to know how its government is operating.
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I must admit that I do no understand this tattoo craze. The only people that had tats when I was a boy were retired Navy Chief Bosun’s Mates and carnival workers. Now even the elderly are in the game, but I can understand their wanting to be young again. It is the already young I do not understand.
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We rarely eat on a schedule at my house, and my mother would be horrified if she knew. She served breakfast at 6:30 sharp. If we missed it, too bad. The kitchen was closed until she served the next meal. Noon meant dinner, and supper came at 6:00 p.m. She never served lunch in her lifetime. It was nonexistent. She changed her schedule only if someone were drastically sick. Her other meals were varied, but breakfast always meant grits and eggs, maybe biscuits, sometimes sausage or bacon. She cooked everything from scratch except cakes. On those rare occasions that she baked a cake, she had Betty Crocker in the kitchen right beside her, taking a turn with the wooden spoon and the glass mixing bowl.
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An exciting weekend for B. J. and me actually kicked off on Thursday. It all began when our friend Rita Williams called to alert us that she was on St. Simons and would be dropping by to see us.

In a little while, Rita swept into our driveway in her big Lincoln Navigator dwarfing Big Red and Little Blue--at least in appearance. She presented us with our Christmas present that she had been promising us since Christmas; that Christmas present is something else; it deserves a story all its own.
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These children are not someone wandering out in a pasture hoping someone would haul them some food. Now these children I am referring to are the children attending the Fourth District School and they should have the same equal opportunity as others in the Appling County School System. They should not be singled out to have their meals prepared at one school at Appling County Middle School and hauled out to Fourth District School; 15 miles out one way to carry breakfast – 15 miles back to middle school, get lunch and carry lunch back to Fourth District another 15 miles and then back after lunch another 15 miles. In addition the school system will have to purchase a van and other equipment. Where are the savings? Does that seem like very good judgment? Truthfully it appears more like exerting authority a total of 60 miles per day to haul meals per day. Now this flip-flopping about the warming kitchen at Fourth District School; if it doesn’t work out we can always go back to preparing meals in the kitchen at Fourth District.
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On behalf of the State Bar of Georgia, I offer congratulations to state Rep. Roger B. Lane, of St. Simons Island, on his appointment by Gov. Nathan Deal as a Superior Court judge in the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, which includes Appling, Camden, Glynn, Jeff Davis and Wayne counties.
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After I put the coffee pot on to perk this morning, I started to unload the dishwasher. Since I hate unloading the flatware basket, I always do it first. I carefully removed it from its slots in the machine’s front door and started to lay it on the cabinet when the latch abruptly opened and dumped all the clean spoons, forks, knives, peelers, spatulas, and God only knows what else into the floor. Immediately from somewhere deep in the remotest recesses of my brain, I thought, “Man, I sure am fumble-fisted this morning.”
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The quarters of a turpentine farm was an interesting place to be raised. Here one could see every aspect of human nature at one time or another, from great compassion to murderous, senseless rage. The black inhabitants of these quarters were to be respected, feared, and pitied above all because this way of life existed before civil rights had ever been heard of and poverty was a constant bedfellow.
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Here is a copy of the column by Georgia Democratic Chair Mike Berlon in the April 22, 2012 Statesboro Herald:

A letter printed in Sunday’s Statesboro Herald (“My thumbnail history of the American left from 1919-2012”) stated a number of inaccuracies about the Democratic Party- a party that I have been elected to represent as Chairman in the great state of Georgia.
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Thanks to my family, church and community for the wonderful birthday party. Your kindness, thoughtfulness, visits, cards, flowers, food, money gifts and care brought a lot of joy to my life.
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Thursday afternoon, when I got home from work, I went to feed the chickens and roosters. One rooster is considered the man of the house because he’s locked down with two hens. The other rooster is blind and humble; he walks around the yard with one hen. Which rooster would you respect more? The one that’s to be man of the house or the one that is blind and humble? Neither, because God has no respect a person. Amen!
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